How to play Half-Life: Alyx without a VR headset

When even Valve themselves acknowledged that smart people out there who wanted to play Half-Life: Alyx without a VR headset would find a way to do it, it was only a matter of time before mods began to appear that would let you do just that.

The first mod to appear that offers this option to players is from r57zone on GitHub and is called Half-Life-Alyx-novr.

Half-Life-Alyx-novr

The first thing you will need to do is head to Github and familiarize yourself with the documentation provided by r57zone. This mod is not a perfect solution to playing Half-Life: Alyx without VR, but it is the only one available at the moment. r57zone has provided a helpful video to help you navigate the process.

The first thing you will need to do is install SteamVR and TrueOpenVR. Once both are installed, you will need to go to the SteamVR window, Setup room, small room, Calibrate, and set the room size to 170cm.

Go to the Half-Life: Alyx game properties in Steam and set the launch options to +vr_gg_gesture_pull 0, then set the Movement options in the game to Smooth. It is strongly advised to follow the video above to ensure the set up is successful.

r57zone has a full list of command translations on the GitHub page, and it is also advised to read it thoroughly before playing the game. Finally, they have a list of areas of the game that might cause problems and solutions for them.

While this is currently the only method available to play Half-Life: Alyx without VR, we will update this article as more mods become available.